I’ve almost 2,500 posts from my early blogging days (mostly longform posts) on Blot. By Blot, I mean individual .md files for posts and a bunch of assets for linked images, files, etc. How do I move it from Blot to Micro.blog?
I want to continue using Blot and have manually cross-posted my longform posts on Micro.blog to Blot Now that I’m relatively assured that search engines don’t surface my Micro.blog posts, I see certain advantages in having my older posts pre-Micro.blog also on Micro.blog. Any help or pointers to resources are appreciated.
PS. I first googled how to do this and came up on posts by @Denny@kaa and @pimoore so wondering if you guys have any tips. I hope to reach out to David at Blot as well but don’t want to take up his time.
No-- you don’t have to do anything. Micro.blog will see the URL in your markdown post, download the image onto micro.blog, then replace that image link with the link to the Micro.blog hosted version.
“Link” isn’t a supported field right now, but it does look for either “URL” or “Permalink” in the front matter. Micro.blog will store that with the post and automatically redirect the old URLs.
Do you mean images not originating at the blog domain? If so, I think that makes sense— presumably they’re not on your other site because you don’t own them, though I think it’s generally considered bad form to use “external” images (people used to call this stealing bandwidth).
Ah! Makes sense although I was linking to my own Flickr and Imgur to view a larger size of the image. They were only a handful so I simply removed the link.
I looked at my URLs again and I don’t think it’s preventing what you call “bandwidth stealing.”
I was hosting my images on Flickr or Imgur and using the img src tag to display them on my blog. But if they are hyperlinked that is, if the img src tag is wrapped inside a href tag then the image didn’t get downloaded & uploaded to Micro.blog. But if I removed the a href tag, it worked.
Another potential snafu…those specifically defined links are only included in posts where I wanted to customize the URL. The vast majority of my posts do not have any sort of link or URL defined. I’m assuming that Micro.blog would have no way to redirect the old URL, and if they were hosted here they would default to the domain.com/year/month/day/first-three-words.html structure. That would leave a bunch of link rot in its wake… Am I right in my assumption? And can you imagine any way to mitigate it?
Also, those links that I have defined are all relative ones like /blog/12/12/cool-post-title. They don’t include the domain. Would that be an issue?
Relative links are fine. Micro.blog will add the domain name to the beginning of it if you enter the domain name for the import.
For when the URLs are not specified in the file, Micro.blog won’t know how to handle the redirects. You can create redirects under Pages → New Redirect, although that will be tedious if you have hundreds of pages.
